From Seneca to Musashi…

Avi Solomon: How did you get to Seneca?

Tim Ferriss: I came to Seneca by looking at military strategies. A lot of military writing is based on Stoic philosophical principles. The three cited sources are — first — Marcus Aurelius and his book Meditations, which was effectively a war campaign journal. The second is Epictetus and his handbook Enchiridion, which I find difficult to read. The last is Seneca and, because Seneca was translated from Latin to English as opposed to from Greek to English, and also because he was a very accomplished writer and a playwright, I find his readings to be more memorable and actionable.

So, Seneca came to me through a number of different vehicles. First, through the study of war and war strategy. Second was through philosophers like Thoreau and Emerson who were also fans of Seneca. Thirdly, was when I was really embracing minimalism and trying to eliminate the trivial many, both materially and otherwise. From a business standpoint, Seneca is constantly cited by people in the “less is more” camp of philosophical thought.

Part of what appealed to me about Seneca was the similarity I found between his brand of stoic thought and the brands of Buddhism and Zen Buddhism that were practiced by people like Musashi Miyamoto. He wrote The Book of Five Rings and is also the most famous Japanese swordsman in history.

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. He would be one of dozens of military leaders who have embraced Stoicism to survive and to win in combat.

Avi: Do you have a favorite letter of Seneca?

Tim: Offhand, it would be hard for me to choose a single one. The first that comes to mind is “On the Shortness of Life,” which is more of an essay. I’ve read Letters from a Stoic at least 50 times and I tend to find different letters appropriate and helpful at different times.

Avi: There’s a difference between reading and doing. How do you apply this in your daily life?

Tim: It’s really, for me, the base foundation of an operating system for decision making, and I’ll explain what I mean by that. I don’t view philosophy as an idle form of intellectual masturbation. I really view good philosophy as a set of rules that allows you to make better decisions. What Stoicism helps you to develop is a value system that allows you to take calculated risks, which I think is very effective for entrepreneurs.

So, in very simple terms, stoicism and, by extension, Seneca teaches you to value only those things that cannot be taken away, meaning you would actively practice poverty, for example, subsisting on the meagerest of food and clothing for, let’s just say, one week every two months. The way Seneca would phrase it is all the while asking yourself, “Is this the condition I so feared?”

That type of practice – and I do view it as a practice, just like you view meditation as a practice and I don’t think it’s entirely coincidence that Marcus Aurelius’ book is called Meditations – helps you to live life offensively as opposed to defensively. So, I would say that on a daily basis I revert to some of the basic principles of stoicism to make decisions about where to invest my time, which relationships to cultivate, which relationships to sever so forth and so on.

Avi: And it’s also making you comfortable with failure. The essence of entrepreneurship is being OK with failure and with having fears.

Tim: Yes, absolutely. It also helps condition you so that you don’t have emotional overreactions to things that you can’t control and I think that’s very, very helpful. Critical even, not only for competitive advantage but for quality of life.

Avi: Do you have a generic method for hacking some advanced skill set. You seem to have hacked so many advanced topics that you must have a method to your madness!

Tim: Well, I do have a method and it’s really a series of questions more than anything else. It’s almost a Socratic process but I would say that, first and foremost, I have to have a very clear, measurable objective, whether that’s in language acquisition or in power lifting.

The common element is measurement, so you need to know when you have succeeded and how to measure progress to that success point, whether that’s a 500 pound dead lift or a 50 kilometer ultra marathon or getting to the point where you can do, let’s say, a single lap in an Olympic pool with 15 or fewer strokes. These are all real examples. The number of footfalls, meaning stride rate, per minute in endurance training and how long I can sustain that for say with a goal of 20 minutes at a time. Or a 95 percent fluency in conversational German as measured through different metrics. Again, all real examples.

So the first is measurement. I have a clear idea of what success looks like and how to measure it.

Secondly, I will look at the most common approaches, which are, oftentimes, the lowest common denominator but have some thread of efficacy. I will ask, “What if I did the opposite?” I’ll look at the established common practices, the established dogma, and ask myself what if I did the opposite.

If it’s endurance training, let’s look at Iron Man training, and the average is 20-30 hours of training per week for people in the upper quartile. What if I limited that to five or fewer hours per week? What would I have to do? How could I make this type of training work, or perhaps be more effective, if I had to focus on low volume instead of high volume? The same could be said of weight training. The same could be said of language learning.

If someone says it takes a lifetime to learn a language or it should take 10 years, what if I had to compress that into 10 weeks? I know it’s “impossible,” but what if? And if they say that vocabulary comes first because we should learn as we did when we were a child, which I completely disagree with – it’s entirely unfounded – what if you were to start with a radicals (Japanese/Chinese) or grammar instead?

So, flipping things on their heads and looking at opposites can provide some very surprising discoveries and shortcuts.

Thirdly, I look for anomalies. For any given skill, there’s going to be an archetype of someone should be successful at that skill. If it’s swimming, for example, it would be someone with the build of Michael Phelps. They would have a long wingspan, relatively tall, big hands, big feet and large lung capacity. So, if I can find someone who defies those anatomical proportions — say, someone who’s 5′ 5″, extremely heavily muscled, like 250, who is still an effective swimmer — I want to study what the anomalies practice because attributes can compensate for poor training. I want to find someone who lacks the attributes that can allow them to compensate for poor training.

Typically, you find much more refined approaches when you look at the anomalies. That’s true for any skill I have looked at, whether that’s programming or otherwise. So, let’s just take computer programming. If the common belief is that someone should start with language A, then progress to framework B and then progress to language C, if I can find someone who skipped those first two steps and is regarded as one of the best programmers in language C, I’m going to look closely at how they developed that skill set. In some cases, it correlates to their use of analogies and background from music or natural languages (for example, Derek Sivers or Chad Fowler)

Then I would say, lastly, is a set of questions related to rate of progress. So I don’t just look at the best people in the world; I look at people who have improved upon their base condition in the shortest period of time possible.

Let’s say I’m looking at muscular gain. I would certainly interview the person who’s, let’s say, 300 pounds and 7% body fat, but there’s a very good chance that I’ll learn more from the person who’s put on 50 pounds for the first time in their life in the last 12 months. So, I always try to establish the rate of progress and, when that person has plateaued at different points, for what duration. I find that exceptionally helpful also for finding non-obvious solutions to problems.

Avi: Thanks, I would call that a meta-hack! It might take a while to digest but it could drive a lot of things in many different domains.

Tim: Oh, sure. That’s the framework that I overlay on any skill I’m looking to analyze and hack.

Avi: So like in language learning, you have one critical sentence I think.

Tim: Right. Each of these different skill sets will have certain domain-specific approaches, but in the case of languages, a big part of learning language quickly is teaching native speakers to deconstruct their own language for you. You only do that through very refined questioning, because they’re not going to be able to explain to you the difference between abstract concepts.

If you say, “What’s the difference between ‘anything’ and ‘something’?” the average native English speaker’s not going to give you a good answer, but if you know how to ask them for comparisons properly and you can simply ask them to, perhaps, provide five or six examples of various types then you can get your answer [so, focusing on deductive learning vs. inductive]. You can essentially use a lateral approach to get your answers. So, in my particular case, it had determined that we had eight to twenty sentences of various types, if you have them translated effectively. Fortunately for native English speakers most of the world is forced to study English or chooses to study English.

If you translate those 8 to 20 sentences, you’ll have a very good grasp of auxiliary verbs, sentence structure, like subject-object-verb versus subject-verb-object, how indirect objects, direct objects are treated, how personal pronouns are treated, etc., and it only takes 8-20 sentences to get all of that onto one sheet of paper. So, it’s entirely possible to become fluent in almost any language. Conversationally fluent – there’s a problem with definition there – so that’s a longer conversation, but effectively what most people would consider conversationally fluent in 8-12 weeks.

Avi: So again, there’s also the traces of Pareto’s law there.

Tim: Without a doubt. The material you choose is oftentimes more important than the method you use, so it’s important to have an understanding of high frequency versus rote memorization from a textbook that doesn’t do any kind of analysis of frequency of occurrence, for example.

Avi: Food, for example, you boil it down to eggs and spinach first thing in the morning.

Tim: Exactly. In behavioral change related to diet, small changes are more effective than big changes. The abandonment rate is less, so I would say give someone a very simple prescription, like 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up, and that could take the form of a few hard boiled eggs and spinach, a few hard boiled eggs and lentils, it could be scrambled, certainly, or you could simply have them consume 30 grams of unflavored whey protein with cold water. I think that in the world of behavioral change, simple works.

Avi: I remember you saying that access to rich experiences doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. Can you expand on that?

Tim: The perception is…let me first take a step back: Most people have a number, a fairly arbitrary number, usually influenced by their peer group, which is a financial target, typically an amount of money in liquid assets like a checking account. So that could be “once I have a million dollars, I won’t have to worry about anything.” “Once I have five million dollars, I won’t have to worry about anything.” “Once I make 250,000 dollars a year, I won’t have to worry about anything.”

That number is typically arrived at with no calculation of what their ideal lifestyle actually costs and the question I like to pose is if you had 20 million dollars, 50 million, 100 million in the bank, after the first month or two of going crazy of buying all the toys and doing all the ridiculous girls gone wild stuff, what would you actually spend your time on a daily basis, monthly, weekly, and what would you like to do and what would you like to have? And then you can sit down and cost those things out and for most people it very seldom costs more than, let’s say, 150,000 dollars a year. [Here is an ideal lifestyle calculator to test this for yourself.]

And what we find is even to privately charter a private airplane in Patagonia, which I did or in my particular case also in the wine county in Argentina, it cost me, I think it was, less than 300 dollars for effectively a half day and that included gasoline costs, or to live on a private island in Panama, especially a research island, to go snorkeling and scuba diving every day, that cost similarly less than 500 dollars.

And what you find is that the deferred-life plan which is based on retirement and redeeming these experiences, that are most valuable in your peak physical years, is a false paradigm. It’s a very Faustian bargain and bad bet. So when I say that having incredible experiences, once in a lifetime experiences, is generally less expensive than people think, it simply results from sitting down and costing those out. So if you want an Aston Martin DB9, there are definitely ways you can do that for 1,500 dollars a month, even if you purchase. And to postpone all of these bucket list experiences until 50, 60 years old or beyond is, I think, a very bad wager.

Avi: So that kind of leads me to the other question I have, which is about college or MBAs. Is college a scam in terms of lost opportunity cost or investment? If you’d rather invest the money, like 40,000 a year, with the added advantage of not being in debt?

Tim: So I’m going to leave aside the debt question, as that’s a very personal question. I have different views of, let’s say, a liberal arts undergraduate degree versus an MBA. I don’t think the objective of a liberal arts education is to train you for a single profession. I view the value of a liberal arts education as making you a well rounded human being, and to that extent I think it’s a very worthwhile investment. The real world doesn’t go away once you enter it, so I don’t see any particular rush in jumping into income generation if you have the option of cultivating yourself through a good liberal arts program. I don’t regret having gone to college at all and I would recommend it to most people who can afford it or find a way to afford it, even if that puts them into debt for limited amount of time.

When you start looking at professional programs like law school or MBAs, then I have a less favorable opinion simply because they’re so specific, and they’re designed to train you for a specific career path. If you’re not confident that is your career path, I view it as a huge opportunity cost and financial burden.

But if your goal is to reach the pinnacle of success in investment banking or management consulting, where an MBA is effectively a prerequisite to have certain job titles, then that is a good investment of your time, if that is your chosen path. It requires being very honest with yourself about your motives. So if you’re going to business school, as I would say at least half of the students do, because they want a two-year vacation, an excuse to party and decompress that looks good on the resume, that’s fine, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that that’s the best way to gain practical business experiences, which it is not.

I would much prefer to take someone who’s interested in becoming a competent deal maker or business development icon and put them into a start up of, let’s say 15 to 50 people, in a position where they can work directly with the CEO or one of the top deal makers or negotiators in the company like a VP of Business Dev. or a VP of Sales.

An MBA buffers your decision making from the consequences of the real world. It’s fantastic if you can sit down in a Harvard case study and determine what the best decision is for a company that you have no vested interest in. It’s quite a different story when you’re sitting across the table from someone who has 20 years more experience negotiating than you do and you have millions of dollars at stake that will personally affect you and affect everyone at your company. Theoretically, you might understand what to do, but you need practice in the trenches to be able to respond properly in those circumstances or you’ll fuck it up.

Avi: What would be advice to a smart kid in high school today?

Tim: I would say choose your friends wisely. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Choose your peer group wisely and if you can’t find the type of mentors that you’re looking for in person, find them through books and don’t be biased towards the latest and greatest. I think that you can certainly learn just as much, if not more, from Seneca and Benjamin Franklin by just reading their writings, as you can from the hot CEO of the moment.

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174 Replies to “How to Use Philosophy as a Personal Operating System: From Seneca to Musashi”

That is a sweet plan!! What is remarkable is that the masses don’t share your thought process. I have often mentioned to friends and acquaintances of a mini-retirement plans of sailing around the world. Their response is always, “You better do that before you have kids!!” Of coarse at this point I ask my favorite question which is, “That an interesting perspective, what make you come to that conclusion?” I am sure you can only imagine the responses I get from people who are stuck in the Rat Race of life. Here are a few that make me laugh…..

Responses like:

1) You can’t just take your kids out of school!!

Haha – I think they will learn more w/ me on a boat sailing the world

2) Your kids will rebel because U R taking them away from their friends

Haha – They will make new friends & learn new languages & customs

3) You can’t just up and leave, they are playing _______

Haha – Oh yes I can watch me & send me an email on what I missed… oh yeah they will be playing __________ in Italy.

Who knows, you may find that you don’t need to be face to face as much as you think for you business to grow. It might just so happen that you meet clients who need your services on your vacations or mini-retirements. Interesting para-dime to try to escape work for work sake and end up getting more business through your global living lifestyle. The more you control where, when, and what you do for monetary compensation the more freedom you will find.

We all can’t wait to hear how the first one goes, but I do have a bit of a challenge for you and that is attempt to do one in the winter as well for the same period of time. This will force you to push your comfort zone a little more & it will force the family to become independent of the “school schedule” families are forced on. Look at it this way a month or two of home study where you as a successful business consultant in a foreign land are educating your own children & educating each other through experience, is much better then your kids learning below average lessons from below average achievers in their local schools (side note to any “haters” both my parents are retired teaches & they support this aforementioned comment).

One thing that Tim’s book does not mention is that we should be teaching our kids these automation systems from the beginning and many of the schooling systems around the world are teaching them to become worker bees in the collective. Think of the lessons you could pass on to them that you have learned in the past few months after reading the 4hww will be paramount in their development. Think of how different their lives will be because you took the time to teach them what traditional school won’t. That is how to be & live FREE!!

The emphasis on Stoic philosophy is something to be… scrutinized to say the least. He who can swallow the toughest stones may not be the wisest (but ugliest?)

There are some other bits of information in this interview that are somewhat useful, but overall this all sounds enormously sophistical. Tim reminds me greatly of those great charlatans written about by Plato so many years ago (particularly in his fascination with physical and material accomplishments).

I’m always amazed on how little humanity has changed, and how the herd loves to follow those who strew false patterns of success and happiness.

I think you would enjoy Alasdair MacIntyre’s book; “Whose Justice? Which Rationality?” It is an interesting piece on the interpreting rationality as not a timeless life construct, but one that evolves with time. I was a joint philosophy and business major at Emory and now started my own web start up. We have built a smart small business consultant into our CRM to help people live a 4HWW! Thanks for your words, wisdom and inspiration.

So nice to be reminded of The Shortness of Life. I read it a long time ago and took away the simple, but timeless message – life is short, but it’s not the time you are on the earth for, it is what you do with the time that counts. It’s an inspiration and I remind myself of it whenever I hesitate making a decision to do something that’s a bit scary!

Just want to say to any one who reads your stuff, it is spot on. I am 49 years old and have lived a life very close to what Tim preaches.

I left school and home at 16 years with very poor reading and writing skills due to dislexcier. With no help or understanding on what I needed to do, in terms of bettering myself, I bought an oxford dictionary and a book to read, to this day i do not know how i worked it out, but i taught myself to read and from there the journey began. This is not a rags to riches story, its a story of instinktively working out how to live a gifted life with out turning into someone else,s slave .How to maniperlate your envirowment to surply you with all your needs. What Tim is saying will work for any one who is willing to put it into practice.I take my hat off to you Tim.

I have never wrote on any blog before so have no idear what i am doing.

I was born in the UK but now live on the beach in Sydney (Ausie) I have a business which i oversee 8hrs a week and 2 kids and a partner. My kids treat me like a mate and i have a life which i live on my terms, its my life so it may not sute everyones tase but it has been built on Tims princples ,just not as defined.

I am off to South America for a year with my familly, the kids will keep up there study on line and we will live off the rent from the house and I will sell or wind up the business. I have no cash as i lost most of it after the GFC.it was only cash so not that concerned as cash is only ever a curentcy to make things happen and you can always get cash if you know how to make a buck not earn a wage.

Tim, I think your focus on self-improvement (and all the other exciting things you do) is interesting and fulfilling but I wonder, would you still do all this stuff if you could never tell anyone about it? How do you think the Stoic philosophers would feel about your answer?

I love this post. Definitely will check out the “Letters” asap. I am currently in college pursuing a business degree, and am surrounded with people bent on dumping cash into their 401k early and often. I completely agree with your philosophy that learning to surf in Costa Rica would be much more enjoyable at 26 than 76. To what extent do you recommend to invest for the future? I know there will be a point eventually in my life where my ability to generate income will dwindle and my need for income will increase. From your experience how much retirement planning is needed?

What a great post. It’s interesting so see so many different topics come out of Tim’s original post. Ian and others have added great comments and thoughts as well.

I want to thank Tim again for the brilliance of the 4 Hour Workweek (and Body). I’ve been applying many of his principles since the release of the 4 Hour Workweek. My family and I have seen so many benefits over the last few years.

We are currently spending the kids summer break in a beachfront cottage in St. Martin. Every morning we wake to the sound of the waves and the kids keep counting how many steps it is to the water (30 or 35, it keeps changing).

Many of our friends keep asking how we do it – Italy last summer and St. Martin this summer.

The craziest questions that I’m getting is how can I leave my corporate job and start a new business while hanging out on the beach in a foreign country. Yesterday, July 1st, was official 30 days out of corporate America and I’m proud to say that my partner and I have 5 signed contracts with new clients and two signed contracts with channel partners in our first 30 days.

This is a great post! I am a philosophy major and can attest to what Avi said about how Seneca is often marginalized.

There has been a lot of posting about family travel so I wanted to chime in because I just got back from Costa Rica where my wife and two kids lived like kings with free rent. After losing 50 lbs. on your diet and subsequently my liver disease disappearing I decided it was time to challenge other assumptions I had.

It is very true that you can both travel with kids and do it cheaply. We lived in CR for 3 months and funded a lot of the trip just by going on a minimalist kick and selling a lot of stuff we thought we “needed.” I also do video work so I emailed almost every home owner in Costa Rica that listed their vacation rental home on VRBO (Vacation Rental By Owners) and offered to do a video tour of their house for trade for rent. I received a ton of interest and we lived there rent free for 3 months.

The main thing that I learned is that when trying to beat the status quo most people are quick to get in your way when you are starting. Everyone in my family told me I was going to get sick from the water, pick up a few parasites, get the bottoms of my feet eaten off by bugs, and my personal favorite; become an atheist. But thanks to a lot of selective ignorance on our part we just said, “Screw it!” and left. Once we got out there and realized how ridiculous all those worries were, all the nay-sayers that were trying to scare us away were wanting to fly out. It’s a lot like what you describe in 4HWW, that people are quick to get in your way when you are starting out but supportive when you already have momentum.

Now I am in an interesting spot because I have the chance to either pursue an MBA or work for a start-up that fits your description in the post. An MBA seems so safe and prestigious. But that is the kind of thinking that would have kept me 50lbs. overweight and stopped me from going to CR. I am not sure I fit in the 2 year partyer category but my motives were definitely geared towards avoiding the trenches and leaning on a title. What I really want is to be a successful serial entrepreneur not a title dropping, insulated from risk, consultant that watches from the sidelines as the big players make deals. I really appreciate your post and your challenge of the status quo. Thanks for keeping me honest, I almost fell back into the drone syndrome.

Great info here! A thought about sports archetypes, when we look at successful body types for specific sports we tend to think that we can’t succeed in a particular sport. Yet when we consider successful athletes, the actual difference between individual humans at their peak isn’t that great when compared to other animals. The point being, putting forward motivation like this and managing our thoughts really can go a long way towards meeting our “species bests” even if we aren’t the pinnacle archetype. Sadly, age is a big confounder here. I’d love to hear more on how to hack the process of aging through the 40’s and 50’s.

Yesterday you were at chase jarvis. To the question “What are your 3 to 5 most important ‘business guidelines ‘. (don’t remember the exact wording)” One answer was that “You are the product of your 5 closest peers.”

I’m very interested in this topic and would like to back it up with more information!

I Love your view on philosophy as a set of rules that allow you to make better decisions. I feel like each and every subject we study can also apply as such. Applying the subjects that are taught in our universities this way will allow students to actually benefit as people from their experience in college rather than just allowing them to get a better job.

Also, the abilitiy to only assign value to those things which cannot be taken away is a principle that is desperately needed today. Back to the college example, if one understands that they can apply the subjects that they learn to their lives in order to make better decisions, then their education becomes much more valuable to them. A piece of paper (degree) can be taken away, but the ability to make intelligent decisions that will lead to a better life cannot.

Thank you Tim, from the bottom of my heart. I have a few projects going on (none completed yet, started only a few months ago), but I learn the most from these real world examples. PLEASE, keep them coming. Inspiring and helpful. I hope you will chose mine one day.

Nice and interesting article Tim. Sorry for the late reply but I read it today. I would like also to note that those old books that you have to pay on Amazon are freely available at the Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org)

My heart broke when they zoomed in on Nando’s face at the beginning of the match. He looked so sad. I honestly thought he’d come in after the 70th minute or so. I’d love for him to see some action in Munich.

Incredibly usuful article, Tim – as always. My life has completed changed since I read Four Our Work Week, and now I guess it’s (finally) time to start meditation, even though I’ve been kind of frightened to take that step. Thank you so much for making such a huge different: for me, and thousands of people out there!

Interesting article & points, I believe the biggest misconception is that more money equates happiness, although it is a commodity I seek & work towards to provide for my own family it does not give happiness, empathy, wisdom nor understanding, perhaps wisdom in the form of intellectual development & higher education, but certainly not in all aspects. I consider wisdom at times to be a matter of personal perception. What I lack in others may be wise about & so I seek that in order to learn & develop.